Even before the new Congress has been seated, some emboldened progressives are pushing for votes to establish Medicare for all. Bernie Sanders argues that 70 percent of Americans favor it, so now is the time. Of course, that support plummets when people are told about its astronomical tax bill and its escalation in government control. But Sanders
An audio version of this article is available here . As long as I can remember, unions have attacked as “scabs” those willing to accept work for wages and conditions those unions reject, even if it involves crossing union picket lines. In fact, that usage goes back centuries, from English slang for a mean, low, “scurvy” rascal or scoundrel. As
September 29 marks the birth of Ludwig von Mises, who Guido Hulsmann’s biography, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism , argued was the 20th century’s foremost economist. Mario Rizzo credits him with “probably the most important single economic idea of the last century: rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism, and attempts to
Recently, I read a Los Angeles Times article that referred to high-deductible health plans as “much hated by employees.” That struck me as incongruous, since high-deductible — or catastrophic — plans are what insurance principles support. If that is true, why would employees hate them? How do insurance principles support high-deductible, or
Jacob Bronowski wrote, in The Common Sense of Science , that “at the basis of human thought lies the judgment of what is like and what is unlike.” That is, useful analysis requires treating that which is like similarly, and that which is unlike, differently. Unfortunately, public policies often mistakenly treat people that are unlike in crucial
Whenever the Supreme Court’s end-of-the-term “announcement season” comes around, I am reminded of the importance of handling precedent correctly under a Constitution that is supposed to remain “the supreme law of the land.” Such a result requires that courts actively maintain constitutional rights against government overreaching, meaning that
There has been a long line of critics of American health care claiming that international comparisons of life expectancy and infant mortality rates provide supposedly irrefutable proof of the need for more government control of our health care system. Los Angeles Times writer Michael Hiltzik recently echoed such assertions to conclude that “the
Every other year, the run-up to election day reminds me of an irony about the “wonders of democracy” rhetoric that peaks then--that is also when the misrepresentations poured into voters’ ears, undermining the likelihood of achieving those wonders, also peak. The reason is well-captured by a quote from Jonathan Swift, in 1710: “Falsehood flies,
In “ How Capitalists Created a “War on Waste ”,” Chris Calton did an excellent job of laying out how the “profit motive encourages the natural reduction of waste,” without requiring government coercion. Selling part of the output of a productive process that would otherwise be thrown away or require costly disposal is as much a source of profit as
On December 14, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled Obamacare unconstitutional because its individual mandate requiring people to have health insurance “can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s tax power,” since the tax that enforced it is now gone. Progressive leaning critics quickly called it bad jurisprudence and assured
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.